Cognitive Dissonance
by Desert of the Real
Summary: Things don't always appear as they seem. Post-series.
1. Prologue

**Disclaimer:** Cowboy Bebop is not mine and never will be mine. Quoted excerpt is from a Wikipedia article, and therefore also not mine.

"_Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing them."_

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She stands in the hallway, fingers clenched tightly around her gun. It takes everything she has to stay calm, to keep breathing, to keep her shaking legs from giving way completely.

She knows he's leaving. And she is plagued with an all-consuming desire to know why. Why he's leaving them behind. Why he's going to throw his life away like an idiot with a death wish. Why he can't just let go of the goddamn past and move on with his stupid life.

He walks by, and she whips out her gun in a flash to stop him, pointing it directly at his head. If he is at all surprised, he doesn't show it. He probably expected her to be there.

"Where are you going?" she asks, taking care to keep her voice cool and even, to maintain that front that she's always put up to hide her feelings. She doesn't want to seem vulnerable, she just wants answers. He turns to look at her, his expression as blank and unreadable as always, but there's a flicker of something in his eyes that she's never seen before. Could it be sadness? Pity? Regret? She doesn't know.

Something inside her snaps. She doesn't want any of his games, any of his signature bullshit. She wants the truth, and she wants it now. "_Why_ are you going? You once told me to forget the past, because it doesn't matter. But you're the one still tied to the past, Spike!"

When he turns his whole body towards her, he leans in dangerously close, completely taking her by surprise. "Look at my eyes, Faye."

She's too paralyzed to do anything but obey, her breath catching in her throat as his eyes bore straight into hers, his face barely inches away. "One of them is a fake because I lost it in an accident. Since then, I've been seeing the past in one eye, and the present in the other. So I thought I could only see patches of reality, never the whole picture."

She swallows nervously, taking an excruciating amount of time to find her voice once again. "Don't tell me things like that. You've never told me anything about yourself. So don't tell me now."

"I felt like I was watching a dream I'd never wake up from," he continues quietly, almost pensively. A brief beginning of a hollow laugh escapes him before he goes on. "Before I knew it, the dream was all over."

He turns to walk away from her with finality, but she's not finished with him. She's not sure exactly what she wants to say to him, something, anything. "My memory came back," she blurts out without really thinking about it, "but nothing good came of it."

Her hands are beginning to shake and her breaths are becoming increasingly shorter, but the words continue to rush out, airing her deepest secrets, before she can stop them. "There was no place for me to return to. This was the only place I could go."

She tries in vain to choke back a sob. "And now you're leaving, just like that! Why do you have to go?" Her emotions are getting the better of her, that careful mask that she had been building with him for so long peeling away piece by piece. "Where are you going? What are you going to do? Just throw your life away like it was nothing?"

"I'm not going there to die. I'm going to find out if I'm really alive." He pauses again, taking a deep breath, as if he's trying to renew his resolve. "I have to do it, Faye," he says almost more to himself than to her.

He turns away from her, to leave the Bebop for the last time, and she knows that there's nothing she can say or do to convince him of anything otherwise. She's left there to helplessly watch him go, to watch his retreating back walk out of her life forever.

She doesn't even try to hold it back this time. Sobs rack her entire body, tears blur her vision and her capacity for rational thought. With a shaking hand, she aims the gun in his direction and holds it there unsteadily for a long moment before turning it upward. She closes her eyes and unthinkingly fires her entire clip into the ceiling.

She barely registers the sound of the gunshots, the dissonant clash of metal on metal ringing painfully in her ears. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Nothing but the feeling of her heart shattering into a thousand pieces.


	2. Chapter One

The blades of the ceiling fan circled dutifully in a well-worn path above Faye as she sharply drew awake. She watched them idly, trapped in a beaten-down, useless cycle of pathetic futility. Just like her life.

This was far from an uncommon occurrence these days. She found herself here more often than not when she had time to kill, stretching herself over every available square inch of the yellow couch, a slave to the magnetic pull of stupid nostalgia that kept her coming back time and time again.

Sometimes she simply lay there quietly, unfocused eyes staring into nothing, lost in inconsequential thought as the smoke from a stolen cigarette vaguely disappeared somewhere into the air. And at others, she drifted off into an uneasy sleep, always dreaming the same damn dream.

Her breathing finally slowed, but the image remained.

That moment. It was always that moment, replaying over and over in her mind, still haunting her at every given opportunity even after six months. She could still feel the chill creep up her spine as a rare unguarded honesty in his eyes pierced straight through her. Time and time again, she watched him walk away from her, never to return, her chest aching just as strongly as it had that day, salt continuing to be poured over the open wound.

She couldn't keep doing this. It was pathetic. Really fucking pathetic. But she couldn't seem to be able to make herself stop.

She didn't know what she hated more: the fact that she thought about him entirely too much, or the fact that she thought about the fact that she thought about him too much. Goddamn stupid lunkhead. Even in death, he still managed to find a way to piss her off like no one else.

With great effort, she pulled herself up into a sitting position, then closed her eyes and buried her face in her hands. But the image of him still burned her retinas and his final words still reverberated in her brain as if no time had passed at all. And nothing succeeded in driving it all away.

_Fuck him. Fuck him to hell._

"Faye? We're almost there."

The sound of Jet's voice brought her out of her reverie, followed by a distinct set of heavy footsteps. She lifted her head to find him entering the room, looking for her. He stopped short in front of the yellow couch, and surveyed her, concern evident in his eyes. "You all right?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," she replied, doing her best to mask anything incriminating from her voice.

She could tell he wasn't convinced, but had decided to drop the issue. That was the best thing to do these days if they wanted to maintain that fabricated sense of normality they'd been limping on for the past six months, just the two of them. He knew it as well as she did.

Faye gestured to the monitor on the table and broke the somewhat awkward silence that had ensued. "So, what's the deal on this guy again?"

Jet sat in the chair across from the couch and bent to get a better look at the monitor. "Owen Barrett. Twenty-nine years old. Small time hacker also known on the net as 'Hermes'." Faye rolled her eyes in exasperation. A geek. This was really shaping up to be a fantastic endeavor.

No one said anything else for a few moments as Jet typed more commands into the console. Everything was so somber and monotonous these days, an attempt to distract themselves from the issue they wouldn't breach, the one that hung over them like a constant dark cloud. Faye suddenly found herself missing Ed. She didn't know where the hell that thought came from, but at this point, all of Ed's nonsense would be a nice change of pace in comparison to the life they now lived.

She barely paid attention as Jet read on. "Cracked a secure database at a local hospital on Ganymede, and got access to medical histories and personal data on over a thousand confidential patient files. A money card transaction tracked him to Callisto."

Faye turned this information over in her mind. "What the hell is he doing on Callisto?"

Jet shrugged. "Who knows. I'm just following a lead. And it's the first decent one we've had in a while."

A sigh from Faye's lips punctured the air in the living area as she reached blindly for a cigarette. She spent a few additional moments bumbling around for her lighter, and then raised the cig to her mouth and lit it, taking a long drag before speaking again. "How much is he worth, anyway?"

Jet checked the screen again. "One million."

Her eyes narrowed dangerously, cigarette still hanging between her lips. "Seriously? You brought us all the way out here for small fry?"

It was now Jet's turn to grow stern, his face setting as he turned away from the monitor to look at her. "You want the money? Don't complain."

At that, a few moments of tense silence fell between them. Faye finally stood and turned away from him, then removed her cigarette from her mouth and extinguished it on the table, ignoring the ashtray completely. "All right, I'm going."

Jet, who had long since given up on maintaining his furniture in anything remotely resembling decent condition, didn't say anything about the new burn mark on the coffee table, but instead sighed wearily. "Faye—"

"Stay out of trouble, check in, blah blah blah, yeah, I know," Faye finished, reciting what she was sure would next come out of his mouth word for word, hands on her hips as she faced the wall. "Stop worrying, Mom. You don't have much hair to lose as it is."

She turned to see Jet visibly bristle at that last jibe, and shot him a winning smile that didn't quite reach her eyes before heading for the hangar. He shook his head in resignation and then watched her retreating back fade further and further from view.


	3. Chapter Two

The Redtail touched down on an almost deserted Callisto street in the last diminishing moments of daylight. Not that there was ever much of that to be had on this world, this cold, desolate, remote excuse of a satellite in the first place.

Faye opened the hatch and carefully let herself out of the craft, narrowly avoiding a pothole as her boots finally made contact with the pavement. A chill swept through her almost immediately, and she huddled her jacket around her in an attempt to combat the brutal temperatures and return heat to her body. But it was useless.

She sighed. The air that passed between her lips clouded in front of her, like cigarette smoke, and rose to the night sky, as clear as ever.

This wasn't a place that she was particularly fond of, a fact that setting foot here had reinforced very strongly. It reminded her of a lot of things she'd rather forget, pushed things to the forefront of her mind that she'd rather not think about. Things that seemed almost as if they were from another life now. Funny as that was.

Though she continued to hold her jacket close to her chest, she shuddered as she walked. She had a job to do tonight, and she would have to make sure that the inevitable reminiscing would be kept to a minimum. Memories were proving to be a royal pain in the ass lately, anyway.

She came to a stop in an alleyway across the street from a seedy bar, the same one she'd found herself in the last time she came here, just as dirty and rundown as she remembered. People of questionable intent filtered in and out of the doorway, burying their faces into their jackets with a dual purpose, as the neon sign above flickered pitifully into the night before finally dying for good.

If she was going to find this guy anywhere on this moon, it was probably here. There was nothing she could do now but wait.

Her fingers drummed impatiently on her folded arms as she stood with her back against the wall. She hoped this guy would be there fast. Stakeouts were boring even on the best of days, and she really wasn't in the mood for one of those right now. Especially for a small fry that would barely provide enough woolongs for a decent round at the racetrack.

Minutes passed, and nothing changed. Her eyes remained fixed on the same spot, but her attention began to wander more and more, before she finally yawned and found herself falling into a dull stupor.

Leave it to Jet to pick something like this.

Then she caught something strangely familiar out of the corner of her eye, something that caused her to let out a very audible gasp of shock. A vague, fleeting silhouette of an image. A tall, lanky man with unruly hair walking past the bar before once again disappearing out of sight.

It had passed too quickly to be real. And it probably wasn't.

Her heart pounded painfully inside her chest as an unpleasant sensation of nostalgia coursed through her before she could stop it. It wasn't him. There was no way in hell that could be him. He was fucking _dead_ and he wasn't coming back.

Her mind had to be playing games with her. Cruel, sick games.

"Get a grip, Faye," she muttered angrily, mentally shaking herself. But it stayed, the image that brought up so many things within her that she never wanted to deal with again. She tried to banish it from her brain, but she couldn't.

No. She wasn't going to let herself do this. It was stupid. Completely and utterly stupid. Fuzzy-haired idiots who were supposed to be dead were not on her list of things she needed to focus on right now.

One last unsteady breath escaped her before she violently shook her head to bring herself back to reality.

Something caught her eye and finally brought her out of her thoughts once and for all. A short, awkward-looking man stopped at the entrance of the bar, looking around nervously. It couldn't be any more obvious that this idiot had a bounty on his head, and he certainly fit the profile of these geeky hacker types.

It was a good enough hunch to move in on, and besides, just standing here waiting for something to happen was incredibly boring. Faye smiled to herself. Show time.

With both hands on her gun in a steady grip, she moved cat-like towards her target, taking care to keep herself carefully cloaked by the shadows and out of sight. A surprise attack would be infinitely more fun anyway.

But in the two seconds that she'd taken her eyes off of him, he was gone.

Shit.

Her breath clouded in an impatient huff as her eyes desperately raked the vicinity for any sign of what she assumed was Barrett. She finally caught sight of him in a split second, sprinting for his life down the alleyway. And with a smug smirk, she began to follow, quickly transitioning her pace into a run. It wouldn't be long before she caught up to him….

She just barely missed a bullet that came out of nowhere and flew straight by her head.

And another.

Blood pumped in her ears, her heart thumping so intensely it felt like it was going to jump out of her chest. She turned. The half-light that a lone street lamp provided only allowed her to catch a glimpse, but it was enough.

There were two armed men headed in her direction that obviously, for whatever reason, wanted her dead.

She ran as fast as she could around the corner and took cover behind a wall as the air began to explode with gunfire.

It took her a few seconds to catch her breath, but she knew she didn't have much time to waste. Gun in hand and face set with determination, she thumbed back the safety, leaned around the corner, and began to fire blindly into the night.

Her efforts were useless. The barrage kept coming, forcing her to take cover.

She lunged over the corner again when the onslaught of bullets momentarily ceased and pulled the trigger, but the only sound to reach her ears was a click. The horrible realization sunk in. She was empty, but her assailants weren't.

All signs pointed to fucked.

A searing pain suddenly coursed through her right shoulder. Life began to pass before her eyes in slow motion as her Glock dropped to the ground with a quiet clatter. Her back slumped against the wall, and she sank down to the concrete, her face twisted in a grimace of pain as her free hand clutched her shoulder tightly.

When she lifted her hand away, it was soaked crimson. It took a few excruciating seconds to register. That was blood. Her blood. A lot of it.

She'd been shot. She hadn't even seen the bullet hit her.

_In and out, in and out_. Sharp intakes of cold air pierced her lungs. Blackness began to tunnel over her field of vision as she fought hard to keep whatever bit of hold she had on the edges of consciousness and to stand once more.

_Come on, Faye._

She sank even further.

_Bangbangbangbang._

Something passed before her eyes in her state of less than half-awareness. Something that she saw and didn't want to see for the second time that night. A fully conscious brain would have wondered if she was going crazy this time. But it was so familiar, and so real…

A Jericho 941 fired and disappeared.

Yeah, really wonderful choice of a hallucination there. She really knew how to pick them.

Her eyelids fluttered and threatened to close.

Another gunshot rang painfully in her ears, cutting into her fuzzy grip on reality. Then came the distinctive sound of something heavy falling to the ground. And then…

Silence.

It all ended as quickly as it had begun.

Her world began to come into clearer focus once more, her hold on consciousness more secure. She exhaled deeply and lifted her head, though her shoulder continued to throb with pain. A pool of blood trickled in her direction, the trail of it leading to the sight of a man lying dead beside her, his still open eyes, glassed over, staring eerily into nothing.

Bile rose in her throat, and she tried to swallow it down as her eyes critically examined the dead man. Who was this guy? Why was he after her?

She maneuvered herself closer to him using only her legs, kicking her gun closer to her reach in the process, and began a haphazard, one-handed search into every single pocket she could reach. There had to be a clue somewhere, something she could go on.

Nothing. Not even a scrap of information.

This was a waste of time. She had to get out of here.

Slowly, she began to push herself off the ground using as much strength as she could manage, the hand off her injured arm shaking in protest as it gripped the Glock tightly. A few moments of struggle ensued before she finally stood firmly, one last hiss of pain escaping her lips.

The sound of her boots clicking against the pavement echoed strangely in the otherwise still silence as she walked with a purpose toward the location where she had last left the Redtail, clutching her throbbing shoulder with a death grip as she did.

It was a long way back to the Bebop.


End file.
